Tom Rhodes is CPJ's East Africa representative, based in Nairobi. Rhodes is a founder of southern Sudan’s first independent newspaper. Follow him on Twitter: @africamedia_CPJ

2013

News coverage of the Kenyan Parliament
elected in March 2013 is off to a rocky start. The press last week was kicked
out of the media center in the National Assembly, and although the speaker
tried to make assurances that overall access won't be affected, journalists are
wary.

Journalists are back to work at Uganda's leading privately
owned daily, The Monitor, after a
10-day siege of their newsroom by police. But that does not mean it is business
as usual for the nation's press. The paper's owners at the Nation Media Group evidently
begged and negotiated for its reopening--signaling to other media houses that they
should toe the government line or face a similar stranglehold. Although the
deliberations were successful in returning the paper to the newsstands, the
long-term costs may prove exorbitant.

Police
arbitrarily arrested Michael Koma, the managing editor of South Sudan's daily Juba
Monitor, on May 2 and detained him for four days following the publication
of an article critical of the deputy security minister. A veteran journalist,
Koma has experienced firsthand the poor state of press freedom within Africa's
newest country. CPJ spoke with him briefly this week.

While Uganda's politicians
and social media are abuzz over a sensational letter reportedly written by a
top security official about a high-level assassination plot, police have
dutifully harassed the mainstream press in a bid to suppress the chatter.

It seemed
clear-cut and sadly familiar: A journalist was shot and killed while walking in
Mogadishu, one of the deadliest places in the world for the press. Yet in the
four weeks that have passed since those initial reports from international and
local news agencies--accounts that were then amplified by the United Nations,
CPJ, and numerous human rights groups--virtually everything about the case has
been cast into doubt. Was there a murder, after all? Who was the woman said to
have been targeted? Does she even exist, at least as she was described? What
did the people described as eyewitnesses really see? And why, after telling
local journalists early on that the case was actually being investigated as a false
report, have police gone silent for weeks?

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Authorities in Ethiopia describe Eskinder
Nega, a prominent columnist and government critic jailed since September
2011 on vague terrorism charges, as a dangerous individual bent on violent
revolution. However, in an opinion handed down in 2012--publicized
only this week by Washington, D.C.-based legal advocacy group Freedom Now--a
United Nations panel of five independent experts ruled that Eskinder's
imprisonment came "as a result of his peaceful exercise of the right to freedom
of expression."

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Last week, two gunmen waited near
the home of a young Somali journalist, Rahmo
Abdulkadir, who had recently returned to the capital from the Galgadud
district in central Somalia where she worked as a reporter for Radio Abudwaq
(Worshipper). According to local journalists, 25-year-old Rahmo had just left an
Internet café in Mogadishu around 9:30 p.m. on March 24 with a friend when she was shot
and killed. Her companion was not harmed.

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"He's free! He's free!" a friend of mine
from Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, shouted down the phone line on Sunday. For a
fleeting second I did not know whom he referred to, given the high
number of journalists imprisoned in the Horn region of Africa--but then it
dawned on me: Abdiaziz Abdinuur had finally found justice. The 25-year-old
freelance reporter was arrested
on January 10 in Mogadishu for the most incomprehensible alleged crime:
conducting an interview.

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Kenya has passed peacefully through its
election period, but questions still hang over the legitimacy of presidential
candidate Uhuru Kenyatta's victory--as well as over the future of the country's
media coverage. During polling, challenges arose for both local and
international media, and they have not subsided. For the foreign press, it is
now unclear how to get accreditation to report in the country. Local journalists
are worried about the rise of self-censorship, and freedom of expression
advocates are concerned by plans for vague regulations on hate speech.

Journalists could be seen rushing from
polling station to polling station Monday to see long queues of determined
Kenyan voters in what was apparently a largely peaceful election, according to
the Deputy Director of Kenya's statutory media council, Victor Bwire. But
leading up to the vote, many journalists worked in a climate of fear; and many
of them say they are still wary that, once results are in, they will face
attacks and other challenges such as they experienced in the aftermath of the
last presidential election in 2007.